


since feeling is first

by decidingdolan



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Tea, mentions of characters, nostalgic thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-13
Updated: 2013-04-12
Packaged: 2017-12-08 08:12:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/759123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/decidingdolan/pseuds/decidingdolan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She asked him to stop for tea. He took her to the End of the Universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	since feeling is first

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from an e.e. cummings poem

Clara. Clara Oswald. That was her name. Had been. Since she could remember, at least. She closed her eyes, feet planted firm on the TARDIS’s floor, she herself sitting on a spare, single-seat couch (which had appeared out of nowhere, within that disco-like room), remembering for a moment how the Doctor had first called her something different. Something else. And his eyes. Wonder, delight, amazement, relief, even, the anxious excitement of a little boy who had finally discovered his long lost teddy bear. Emotions flickering through them, and he had only seen her for a few seconds. Oswin. But where, where of all places, had that name come from?

She was Clara. Simply Clara. Rarely Clara Oswald. (When her mother was around, or when her father was cross, which was not often, definitely Clara Oswald.) 

Clara had started to whistle a tune, a simple, upbeat melody when the Doctor strolled in.

He was something, all right. No. Not something. She had had clarifications. Explanations. Time. (Oh, shouldn’t be mentioning that, of all the stalling tactics. Time was unnecessary, an accompaniment to her trip on the spaceship—it was a spaceship, as she did find out. Smaller on the outside. 1950s, tall, and blue. Bursting with lights, colors that mixed and disintegrated and disappeared and reappeared and were recreated, clunks and the occasional harmless fireworks when he was working with its engines, noises and roars and explosions and collisions while they cruised through the fluid of time, the very currents that brought in seconds, ticks on the clocks, now rendered insignificant.

She was very much still trying to come to terms with that.)

His eyes caught onto hers, and she smiled.

There were worlds inside them, ends of universes and dawns of galaxies, deaths of the beloved and separation from the past, surging passion and tumultuous grief, burning curiosity and hidden secrets.

His suit, that set of “sensible clothes,” he often proudly (straightening his bowtie as he did so) spoke of, amused her. The purple, the pocketwatch, and the waistcoat. He was an odd combination, an indeterminable puzzle. 

She looked at him now, a thousand years old and standing before her. Inches away. Elbow against a console of his machine, waiting.

“So,” he began, a single word echoing off the TARDIS walls. She wondered what could possibly be buzzing within his mind, the ancient and the youthful, eternal jostling matches between prolonged silence and shattering shouts. “Where to?”

It wasn’t a taxi service, the TARDIS. No, not the least of it. 

But they were always off somewhere, gallivanting, catching their breaths, rescuing themselves from the edge of death’s cliff. 

And she could not get enough.

He had told her it was dangerous. Warned her, taken her hand in his and led her, past the gaping blue doors, into the room that wasn’t just a room, clanked on the consoles, and promptly catapulted her from normalcy into delirium.

Rush. Adventures. Time and space that weren’t concepts or abstract physics equations scrawled in black and green and red ink across a blackboard. Whirlwinds and black holes and floating rocks and sunrises and comets and rings of Saturn and moons and stars that existed and were within hands’ reach, out of those familiar blue doors and not static on an encyclopedia page. Words and emotions and music and voices that surrounded her, dialects and speeches and soliloquies and monologues and confessions that poured out of pens, of screens, of projections, of speakers, of mics, of lips that she had never dreamed of seeing. Fear and passion and rebellion and—

The TARDIS was still.

It was fine, she thought to herself. Not wrong to stay afloat in space for a while (in the completely subjective sense of the word, of course).

“I was thinking,” she said at last. He glanced up from the controls, interest and attention piqued at the sound of her voice. 

“Maybe we could just stop and have some tea first.”

She saw the brief emotional roller coaster in his facial expressions, the transformation from incredulity to mild impatience to reluctant resignation. 

“Are you serious?” he asked, sentence accompanied by one of his energetic (he was that fully charged battery which did not seem to run out) hand gestures. “We’re floating light years away from the planet you call home, knee-deep in suns and stars, and you want to stop…for…tea?” 

“Something wrong with that?” she countered, fast. 

He leaned back against the console. There was a half-hearted shrug. 

“Don’t say British,” she continued, watching his face, “I said stop, but I didn’t say when, and definitely did not say where.”

His face lit up, beaming and bright. He rushed to the controls, hands splayed across the colors, the whirl of buttons, yanking and pulling, thrusting and fussing. Chaos, motions, sensations. They were back into it.

She could sense his enthusiasm.

Another day, another adventure.

_Here we go again._

“You did the first part,” he grinned, “Now I will do the rest.”

Him and his bowties. The man in his blue box. The tall figure in his glittering purple coat that she had trusted with her life (partly because space was a mystery to her, aliens the creatures released out of a diagon alley she did not know exist, time presently the last of her possible concerns, but mostly, entirely because she knew. She knew that once she had leapt with him, put a stop to all the clocks in her world, turned (her concept of) the universe on its head, and departed from the mundane and the secure, the predictable and certain, the established and dictated, she would not return. Her feet were off the ground, into space and, to be a tiny bit cliché, the beyond. Gone.)

She held onto the nearest stable surface while the TARDIS turned, crashed, and suddenly stopped.

He extracted himself from the controls and turned towards her, a hand panning towards the door. “After you,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow. “You haven’t told me where.” The red handbag was already slung across her shoulder, despite her skeptical words. “Or when,” she added. This was another question she needed to get used to, another language convention, one of the little tricks when her journey was not so much as a trip down the hallway as a split second warp to the edge of the galaxy. 

A tip of his head towards the doors, which propped open with the click of his fingers, and nothing more.

She murmured an “All right,” under her breath and walked to the TARDIS’ edge.

The sight had her stopped in her tracks, mouth agape. “But….it’s not…”

The Doctor stepped up to her, a look too smug for him plastered on his face. “Oh yes, it is.”

She stared and stared, robbed of breaths and lost in amazement. This wasn’t. It couldn’t be. But it was. It was. Alive. Here, now. In front of her. 

A hand reached into the bag, unconsciously grazing the cover of the well-worn paperback she had grabbed from her bookshelf, out of bemused curiosity and feverish anticipation (just a little before their 7pm appointment). 

Beside Clara Oswald, the Doctor smiled.


End file.
